[osis-users] Unambiguous and Consistent OSIS for Interchange: Stand-off Markup

[Weston Ruter]

Troy:

> I did say that since OSIS allows different ways to mark the same structure,
> we have an importer which attempts to accept any valid OSIS doc and
> _normalizes_ that doc into a form of OSIS we find easiest for our engine to
> process.  It is still OSIS, just a form of OSIS with all structures
> represented in a single way.
>

Thank you for clarifying this, and also for sharing some of this history
behind the development of OSIS.

[We chose to] augment the specification with a 'best practices' doc which
> recommends a single specific method for encoding OSIS.
>

I don't think I have seen this best practices doc. Is this something you use
internally at CrossWire as part of your importer script? Could you direct me
to it? I like the approach you took, allowing varying OSIS encodings but
recommending only one of them. This is similar to the development of XHTML
1.0 dialects, where you are allowed to use the Transitional doctype, but the
Strict doctype is recommended. Doing this for OSIS could answer the need for
an unambiguous single markup language. The best practices document would
need to contain the practices that are endorsed by at least the majority of
players; the others could abstain and still use their preferred (deprecated)
dialect of OSIS. Along with this best practices doc, an official normalizer
script that translates OSIS into the recommended encoding would be great.

I look forward to your thoughts about stand-off markup encoding of OSIS,
especially how well it might serve as the new recommended way to
unambiguously encode OSIS.

Thanks!
Weston


2010/1/19 Troy A. Griffitts <scribe at crosswire.org>

> Weston Ruter wrote:
>
>> ... Troy, as you've said before, you can't actually use OSIS as your raw
>> data format at CrossWire because an OSIS document can be authored in many
>> different ways and so there is much more programming logic that is needed to
>> handle all of the possible OSIS styles.
>>
>
> Hey Weston,
>
> Hope to have time for a thoughtful response to more of your suggestions,
> but just wanted to clear a couple things up first:
>
> I hope I never implied that we can't/don't use OSIS internally as our
> primary markup standard.
>
> I did say that since OSIS allows different ways to mark the same structure,
> we have an importer which attempts to accept any valid OSIS doc and
> _normalizes_ that doc into a form of OSIS we find easiest for our engine to
> process.  It is still OSIS, just a form of OSIS with all structures
> represented in a single way.
>
> Even so, we still don't use any plain text format as our "raw data format".
>  We typically compress and index documents when they are imported into our
> engine.  You can ask our engine for OSIS, HTML, RTF, GBF, ThML, or plaintext
> and it will do its best to give you the data in the requested format.
>
> None of this to argue against your point: OSIS has multiple ways to encode
> a single structure in a document.
>
> The real answer to this is not technical.  I too am frustrated with this.
>  But many people working at many organizations were consulted when
> developing the OSIS specification.  They gave great insights to how they
> work.  Sometimes they even made demands with an ultimatum that they would
> absolutely not use the specification if a certain feature was not added to
> the spec.
>
> OSIS could have been technically finished in less than a year.  It took us
> 3 years to get buy-in from all the participating organizations.
>
> In the end, the purpose of OSIS was to build collaboration between
> organizations.  We could have developed a much easier to use technical
> specification which no one would have used, or conceded to demands to gain
> buy-in, and augment the specification with a 'best practices' doc which
> recommends a single specific method for encoding OSIS.  We chose the later.
>
> Implementing code against the spec now, it makes our importer a pain in the
> butt to write, but in the end, we get what we want: a single OSIS style that
> our engine knows how to work with, and multiple supporting organizations
> producing OSIS documents.
>
>
> Troy.
>
>
>
>
> If we could define a single document structure, however, one
>
>> that is a subset of the freedom that OSIS provides (perhaps taking cues
>> from OXES), we could then have an XML format for scripture that would be
>> suited for efficient interchange and application traversal.
>>
>> Currently we have the problem of two overlapping hierarchies: BSP and BCV.
>> However, there could be potentially multiple versification systems, so there
>> could be even more than two overlapping hierarchies, probably why the <p>
>> element isn't currently milestonable. To get around the problem of
>> overlapping hierarchies, what if we introduced stand-off markup into the
>> equation? The words of scripture themselves could all be located in a flat
>> structure as siblings; then in the header there could be multiple CONCUR
>> sections (views) that list out the elements which belong to the various
>> parts of the hierarchies
>>
>> For example, the current approach:
>>
>> <p>
>>    <verse osisID="Example.1.1" sID="Example.1.1" />
>>    <w id="w1">Then</w>
>>    <w id="w2">he</w>
>>    <w id="w3">said</w><w id="p1">,</w>
>>    <q marker="“" sID="Example.1.1.q1" />
>>        <w id="w4">Let</w>
>>        <w id="w5">us</w>
>>        <w id="w6">go</w><w id="p2">...</w>
>> </p>
>> <p>
>>    <w id="w7">but</w>
>>    <verse eID="Example.1.1" />
>>    <verse osisID="Example.1.2" sID="Example.1.2"/>
>>    <w id="w8">don't</w>
>>    <w id="w9">forget</w>
>>    <w id="w10">your</w>
>>    <w id="w11">backpack</w><w id="p3">.</w>
>>    <q marker="”" eID="Example.1.1.q1" />
>>    <verse eID="Example.1.2" />
>> </p>
>>
>>
>>
>> Could instead appear as (I'm making up these element names):
>>
>> <concur>
>>    <view type="verse" osisID="Example.1.1" xpointer="range(#w1, #w7)" />
>>    <view type="verse" osisID="Example.1.2" xpointer="range(#w8, #q2)" />
>>    <view type="quote" xpointer="range(#q1, #q2)" />
>>    <view type="para"  xpointer="range(#w1, #p2)" />
>>    <view type="para"  xpointer="range(#w7, #q2)" />
>> </concur>
>> <content>
>>    <w id="w1">Then</w>
>>    <w id="w2">he</w>
>>    <w id="w3">said</w><w id="p1">,</w>
>>    <w id="q1">“</w><w id="w4">Let</w>
>>    <w id="w5">us</w>
>>    <w id="w6">go</w><w id="p2">...</w>
>>    <w id="w7">but</w>
>>    <w id="w8">don't</w>
>>    <w id="w9">forget</w>
>>    <w id="w10">your</w>
>>    <w id="w11">backpack</w><w id="p3">.</w><w id="q2">”</w>
>> </content>
>> By structuring a document like this, multiple overlapping hierarchies can
>> be cleanly defined, although they are separated from the underlying content:
>> this however, provides the benefit of clearing up the confusion as to where
>> the <verse>, <p>, and <q> elements should be placed: in the concur section,
>> they each can share references to the same content elements and so their
>> boundaries are specified at the exact same location. This means that XML
>> processors would be able to consistently handle each of the hierarchies as
>> they interweave throughout the content data.
>>
>> Efraim Feinstein and James Tauber introduced me to this approach to
>> structuring markup. See also:
>> http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P4/html/NH.html#NHCO
>>
>> Weston
>>
>>
>
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